Friday, April 16, 2010

The 2D RTS Bos Wars (BW) 2.6 has been released, after two years of release-silence. The new release includes

Enhancements to the editor and map format

New units, tilesets, maps, translations (italian and portugese)

A campaign

About the campagin, which is called "swindler", I can only say that the story drawings are beautiful and that the first mission is unbeatable boring (which is why I can't say anything about follow-up missions, if there are any): you need to navigate a weak unit through a maze of high-damage towers - blind. You only have a chance when you have a good memory and accept having to restart the mission 20 times. The only other scripted scenario is the tutorial level, which has (computer-generated) mission voices even! You can see both missions being played (and the mentioned story drawings) in this video [tinyogg].

The new map format is 'patch-based', which is like 'tile-based' I suppose, only that it allows you to use tiles of any dimensions. The editor works well, it could only use a 'tile draw mode' which would continue to draw tiles while holding down the mouse button (this happens for units, but not for tiles). Here's a video [tinyogg] demonstration of the editor, make sure to skip if it gets boring, I show off tile, resource and unit placement and then test-play the map.

What I really really want BW to have is a tower defense map/mode. :)

Since I started talking about editors, I'll just go ahead and show the PARPG one:

The editor is all right, it seems to be a bit hard to get existing resources into the game though: they need to have a xml definition file for each image (hand-written I assume) and then you have to import them into the map with multiple mouse clicks.

Damnation of the Gods aims to become an enhanced Dungeon Master clone. Right now it is an old-school engine with a pleasant GUI which relies on freeware DMJ's assets. Assets is what the project mainly needs.. and maybe some guidance for a plot?..

Dragon History is a Czech-language (with some horrible but fun text translations) adventure game for scummVM. Its code is GPLv2-licensed. I got no reply yet after asking for the gfx and audio's license..

Did I already mention that my Linux game video recording troubles were over the day I discovered this guide to use ffmpeg for it?

Search and Rescue 0.9 was released. Contrary to FlightGear I was able to get my vehicle into the air (on the third try ;) ). Sounds would not work but I kind of like the low-resolution textures. I'll have to play it a little more to figure out if there's more fun things to do besides crashing helicopters. ^^

@qubodup Well, you start in front of a gate that leads into the dungeon. There you pick some heroes from picture hanging on the walls or create new ones. Afterwards you go on and just crawl through the dungeon. There is no reason to it other than going on and solving puzzles and killing monsters and getting your characters to improve their arts and stats. Sounds boring, I know, but it actually was a lot of fun. So DotG does exactly what DM did, only on newer machines in higher screen resolution ;)

@qubodup Ahhh now I see what you meant *laughs* Yeah, it should be more than one room. DM had several levels full of rooms :) But I havn't tried DotG yet, so I don't know whether you missed some exit there.